Lovers are a lot like hot sauce — they range from “mild” to “intense.”
Australian scientists have boiled romantic lovers down into four categories — with the most extreme said to make whoopee up to 20 times per week, according to a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
“The bottom line is that we don’t all love the same,” said Adam Bode, head researcher and PHD student at the Australian National University in Canberra, Phys.org reported.
Bode, who specializes in romantic love and human mating, felt that this field was woefully “under-researched given its importance in family and romantic relationship formation, its influence on culture and its proposed universality.”
As such, he wanted to blaze a trail in the realm of boudoir scholarship. “While there is evidence of variation in the psychological expression of romantic love, to our knowledge, no one has attempted to directly empirically investigate this phenomenon,” he wrote.
To shed light on the seemingly taboo topic, Bode and his team pulled stats from the Romantic Love Survey 2022, a dataset using data from over 1,500 people spanning 33 different countries.
They then categorized 809 young adults who were in love based on commitment, obsessive thinking, emotional intensity, and sex frequency. Participants were also asked about various habits, such as how often they drink alcohol, whether they’re on antidepressants or if they drive dangerously.
From these results, researchers were able to group the respondents into four very hot sauce-esque categories: mild, moderate, intense, and libidinous.
Mild lovers, who made up 20% of all lovers, displayed the lowest levels of all the romantic love categories, from commitment to sexual activity.
Only 25% reported that their partner was in love with them, and they reportedly had sex twice a week on average.
“They have fallen in love the greatest number of times, have been in love for the shortest length of time, and are most likely to be male and heterosexual,” added Bode.
Moderate lovers were the best represented in this carnal quartet, comprising a whopping 40% of all lovers.
They were defined as “entirely unremarkable” due to their staid romantic love traits, including “relatively low intensity and relatively low obsessive thinking, relatively high commitment, and relatively moderate frequency of sex,” per Bode.
These hanky panky plain Janes reportedly had sex 2.5 times per week on average.
On the other end of the spectrum were “intense romantic lovers,” making up 29% of the lovers, and described by researchers as “head over heels” types with high-intensity scores in every category.
“These lovers scored the highest intensity, highest obsessive thinking, highest commitment, and relatively high frequency of sex,” said Bode, who had the highest proportion of people who fell in love before their romantic relationship started.
The cohort, which reportedly got frisky three times a week on average, was also the only group with more females (at 60%) than males.
Then, of course, there were the libidinous romantic lovers — the proverbial freaks in the sheets. Comprising the smallest cluster (just 9%), these sex fiends reportedly made love 10 times a week on average, sometimes hitting 20 sessions in the sack.
Coincidentally, they were the least likely to report being anxious, worried or depressed. Libidinous lovers also demonstrated high levels of emotional intensity, commitment, and obsessive thinking and many were in serious relationships despite not living with their partners.
From these findings, researchers deduced that “variation is a necessary component for evolution” and different groups represent different strategies in terms of mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair bond formation.”
“This study will help facilitate ideas for future research, and these findings have implications for the evolution of romantic love,” said Bode. “Humans may still be evolving in terms of how they express romantic love.”
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